Plain Talk

By Mursi Saad El-Din

---

Christopher Fry died a few days ago at the age of 97. Some people may not know who he was, as it is some time now since his play The Lady's not for Burning was a great success in London's West End. It ran for nine months, a big achievement in those days. All the more so since it was written in verse, a medium that was out of fashion.

T.S. Eliot was regarded as the last writer of poetic drama with his Family Reunion and Murder in the Cathedral. Then arrived Fry, first with the Boy with a Cart, then The Tower, A Phoenix Too Frequent, and The Firstborn. This last play was a poetic treatment of the fight between Moses and Seti, the allegedly Egyptian Pharaoh involved with the fight of the Jews.

Fry was greatly influenced by Eliot, especially in his first two plays. In fact he admitted that to the drama critic Michael Billington who wrote Fry's obituary in the Guardian Weekly. I remember how during a visit to London, the British Council arranged for me a meeting with Billington. During our lengthy discussion of the state of the English theatre the topic of verse drama was brought up.

I explained to the English critic how verse drama was popular in Egypt thanks to Ahmed Shawky and Aziz Abaza. I had seen Fry's The Lady's not for Burning and Billington quoted Fry as saying "I suppose he had some influence on me."

In his obituary, Billington follows the life and rise of Fry, then how he became a sacrificial victim of the theatrical revolution of 1956 with the emergence of Pinter and Osbourne. But, according to Billington, "he bore his fall from fashion with the stoic grace of a Christian humanist and turned his attention to writing epic films, most notably Ben Hur in 1959. Fry, like Harold Pinter, was a pacifist, a conscientious objector. When he met Eliot in 1939 he asked him what he could do in wartime that didn't mean shooting people.

The Lady's not for Burning was first staged at the Art's Theatre in 1948 and transferred to the West End in 1949. That was when I saw the play with John Gielgud and Pamela Brown in the leading roles and the young Claire Bloom and Richard Burton appeared in supporting roles. The 1940's and early 1950's were the heyday of English theatre with such great actors as Gielgud, Olivier and Ralph Richardson.

According to Billington "In a postwar theatre that had little room for realism, the play [ The Lady's not for Burning ] became a flagship for the revival of verse drama. There were sceptics, among them Kenneth Tynan, the then young critic who savaged plays. He was of the opinion that Chekov, Ibsen and Shaw had proved that prose was the proper form of contemporary drama.

But Fry persisted with his real belief in verse drama. In 1956 he wrote Venus Observer, followed by The Dark is Light Enough and A Sleep of Prisoners. I had the pleasure of seeing the three plays in West End theatres.

Fry's activities did not stop at writing plays, he translated plays as he realised that he could not stand anguish: what Billington calls "the Royal Court Revolution of 1956" which put a premium on prose realism." The Royal Court was a small but pioneering theatre in Chealsea which for some years was headed by P. H. Newby who had worked as professor of English at Cairo University.

In his obituary, Billington describes his meeting with Fry on his 80th birthday, and how he seemed "free from bitterness. He evoked his period in the theatrical sun with great content, praised younger writers such as Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard, and seemed to embody the Aristotelian ideal of magnanimity."

Billington ends his obituary saying "Fry helped to revive English verse drama, to which he brought colour, movement and a stoic gaiety. How many of his plays will survive, only time can tell. But at his best he brought a spiritual élan to the drab world of postwar British theatre."